The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat? An Excerpt from the BookAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

The idea that you can humanely kill an animal is
completely absurd. The very act of killing is the greatest source of
inhumanity and the worst act of violence. Based on the formulation of
betrayal articulated above, the more humanely an animal is treated, the
greater is the bond of trust, and the greater the bond of trust, the more
severe the crime of betrayal. By this standard, killing “humanely” treated
animals could be a much greater act of betrayal.

Photo by Robert Grillo, Free From Harm

It is curious that people will show great concern for how farmed animals
are treated when alive and yet do not seem to be troubled by their
slaughter. This fact seems to demonstrate a general inability to appraise
the various gradations of moral transgressions, with killing being at the
furthest end of the spectrum of immorality. Especially with respect to
animal slaughter, there is a general tendency to ignore gradations of
violent and harmful actions.

Our criminal justice system is based on the idea that punishment must be
proportional to the crime, and we, as a society, have institutionalized
varying gradations of punishment proportional to how serious we consider a
crime to be. There is a general consensus that taking another’s life is
amongst the most serious type of crime.

In the United States, the death penalty is practiced in thirty-three of
the fifty states and almost exclusively when the most horrible crime has
been committed: murder. (1) Even then, extraneous circumstances must have
also occurred—pre-meditation, kidnapping, rape, etc.—to warrant the death
penalty. The extent to which our society values the human animals’ life is
highly admirable. Why is a nonhuman animal not afforded the same
consideration? While I am certainly not advocating a position where people
who kill animals receive the death penalty or are treated as murderers,
there are compelling parallels between killing animals and killing humans.
An animal has the same will to live as a human does. And, as stated in the
introduction, they have the same consciousness, awareness, and emotional
capacity. Are they really so different?

Pig in transport to slaughter. Photo: Toronto Pig Save

In our tendency to deny farmed animals a place in our circle of
compassion, we fail to properly assess the gravity of the act of killing and
tend to exclusively consider the conditions in which an animal lives. There
is a sense that it is okay to slaughter an animal as long as she has been
treated well, the “one-bad-day” scenario. In this sentiment, we fall short
of extending the same recognition to animals that is the cornerstone of our
criminal justice system: that taking life is the highest transgression, much
worse than any crime that allows for the survival of the victim. For
example, would you rather have six months in a five-star hotel and then be
executed or have a lifetime in jail? Most everyone would take the lifetime
in prison, even if the conditions were harsh. Because animals share similar
behaviors to humans regarding their will to live, it is safe to assume that
they would share the preference for living as well. Life is an animal’s most
cherished possession and animals, like humans, will fight to survive. It is
absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their
handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic
right—to live out their lives—and condone or are complicit in their
slaughter. Clearly, the killing of the animal is the most severe
transgression, greater than any mistreatment that allows the victim to live.
And because of that, our greatest concern should not necessarily be the
treatment of the animal, though this is obviously very important; rather,
the greatest consideration should be that the animal be allowed to live.

To propose another question: Would you rather be murdered or assaulted
with a baseball bat? Even though being hit with a baseball bat would be very
painful or potentially debilitating, most rational people, if faced with
this horrible choice, would prefer to be victimized in a way that allowed
them to live. Even if there is no assurance of full recovery (excepting
cases where there is ongoing and irreversible suffering) it is preferable to
live, because most people value life above all other considerations of
well-being. This is a value that animals share, and it should be extended to
them. To illustrate the point differently: Would you hit a pig with a
baseball bat? Of course not, and it would be unacceptable for a rancher to
do so, also. So why is it acceptable to inflict the greater
violation—killing the pig? As a society we tend to consider the lesser
infraction of animal cruelty to be a much greater moral wrong than the much
greater transgression of killing, and somehow we find it acceptable to
condone the killing of animals that are marketed as humanely raised.
Labeling killing “humane” is as contradictory as calling the lifeless
remains “happy.”

"Humane" cow slaughter

The consideration that killing is the worst of transgressions is not
limited to humans in our society. Our comprehensive anti-cruelty laws for
companion animals also follow this logical progression. Captain Cindy
Machado, Director of Animal Services for over twenty-nine years at the Marin
Humane Society in Novato, California, has explained that the severity of
animal cruelty has a bearing on the level of the charges against the person
responsible for the crime. Captain Machado said, “In the maximum punishments
we’ve seen, the animal has to have been brutally injured or killed. That
makes a difference whether or not cases are charged at the felony level or
just a charge of a misdemeanor.” She added, “If an animal is killed as a
result of abuse or neglect, the punishment is likely to be more severe.” It
is considered cruelty, so extreme that you could acquire a felony charge and
jail time, if you kill a dog (2)—but kill hundreds of cows a day, and you
get a paycheck.

We have made farmed animals exempt from our basic moral understandings of
the degree and severity of offenses and have somehow compensated for this
nagging, unconscious compunction with the compromise that farm animals must
at least be treated well while alive. This is a good first step in bringing
to our conscious awareness the admission of their suffering, but the logical
extension of this thinking is that we should not kill them at all, as
killing is the worst of all the acts we can commit against one another.

There is a strong disparity between the enjoyment that we receive from
consuming animal flesh and the sacrifice that an animal has given to provide
this pleasure. We receive relatively little, and the animal is forced to
give everything. This is a complete inequality for the animal who has been
killed for the momentary indulgence. Such a fleeting enjoyment cannot match
the value of the permanent state that is death, and therefore the animal has
given much more than the consumer has received. This is injustice. Robert
Grillo eloquently wrote in his blog Free From Harm, “and even when the human
interest is trivial and the animal interest is a matter of life and death—as
in the case of satisfying our palate pleasure—we still place our interest
over theirs. And we do this automatically because that’s how it’s always
been done—not because we’ve really given any serious moral consideration to
the issue—but simply because we can.” (3)

Jenny Brown and Dylan the steer at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary

The idea that you can humanely kill an animal is completely absurd. The
very act of killing is the greatest source of inhumanity and the worst act
of violence. Based on the formulation of betrayal articulated above, the
more humanely an animal is treated, the greater is the bond of trust, and
the greater the bond of trust, the more severe the crime of betrayal. By
this standard, killing “humanely” treated animals could be a much greater
act of betrayal.

This does not imply that it is more ethical to abuse and then kill an
animal, because in this scenario there is no element of betrayal. Rather,
this is only to posit that regardless of how the animal is treated there is
a moral transgression. If the animal is treated well before slaughter, then
betrayal is the infraction preceding the act of killing. If the animal is
treated badly, then abuse is the preceding crime. Either way, if animals are
raised for the purpose of ending their life to serve the interests of the
human captor, regardless of how the animal is treated, whether abused or
betrayed, it is wrong.

While violence is undoubtedly a severe criminal act, some might argue
that betrayal is even worse. In Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic
poem Divine Comedy, the first part, entitled Inferno, famously reserves the
deepest of the nine circles of hell for the betrayer, while violence is only
considered the seventh, followed by fraud, which is the eighth. Because
these concentric circles represent a gradual increase in wickedness, Dante
is issuing a clear statement: to covertly deceive with malicious intention
is even worse than an overt act of violence. Perhaps this distinction is
subjective, but it is important to note that violence, betrayal, and fraud
are all committed in the act of killing an animal, especially one with whom
we’ve developed a bond of trust (betrayal) and one that will be labeled
humane (fraud). Yet we find on “alternative” farms that most animals are not
at all humanely treated, despite misleading labeling to the contrary. We
will delve deeper into this deception in chapters 2 and 3.There can be no
such thing as happy meat. Meat is dead. It has no emotion. However, it came
from a living, breathing, sentient being who had the capacity for happiness;
one assumes that this is what the folks who use this term mean—that the
living animal, before he became a piece of meat, was happy. But this just
perpetuates the fatal flaw in the entire concept of eating animals and
animal products. One day soon, no matter how happy the animal is, she will
be dead. And no sentient being is happy to be killed. On the contrary, any
animal will fight to live. Death is an unhappy option—an unwelcome prospect.
Animals desire to continue living. The concept of happy meat is erroneous,
and as will be revealed in the following chapters, “happy” farmed animal
operations are anything but.

Unless you were with an animal through her entire life and accompanied
her to the slaughterhouse you do not know what kind of life or death she
had. It is impossible to really know. Manufacturers will tell stories that
pacify, labels show pictures that appease, and websites offer fabrications
that soothe the conscience. If you cannot be sure, don’t take the risk,
because the animal behind the delightful label was not happy and may have
suffered considerably. The industry will lie to sell products.

The idea of being an ethical meat eater or a compassionate carnist (4),
has inherent contradictions. This is not to say that people who consume
animal products are fundamentally without compassion or ethics. People can
be extremely compassionate and ethical in some areas of life, such as when
it comes to children, the poor, the environment, companion animals, etc.,
and then go home and eat a cheeseburger. The implications of this later
action contradict the values expressed in the previous actions. I have seen
friends weep over the loss of a dog or cat, but then shed no tears for the
animal they will eat that day who certainly suffered much more than their
dog or cat. If they knew the pig, and the misery she endured, they would
likely also be distressed by her life cut short merely for a meal. Most
people have compassion for helpless beings and don’t want to see them die,
but their window of compassion is only open for certain species. Open the
window wide and let farm animals into your sight of concern. Farmed animals
have the same ability to suffer as any other animal and they are worthy of
our sympathy, just like an injured bird that fell from a nest, just like a
starving, stray dog. We would offer assistance to these animals if it was
within our ability to help them — why are pigs, cows, and chickens exempt
from this compassion? How can we, in good conscience, kill when it is
unnecessary? (5) Causing another’s death when there is no benefit to our
health or to the planet, and indeed, when it is harmful to the environment
and our bodies, simply is not consistent with the dictates of ethical
living. We must widen our circle of compassion to embrace all nonhuman
animals.

This essay is reprinted, with permission, from the book, The Ultimate
Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat?, by Hope Bohanec. Learn more at
www.the-ultimate-betrayal.com.

(2) Unless the dog is legally euthanized in a shelter. However, the point
is the same. If it is wrong to kill an individual animal, then it should be
worse to kill large numbers of animals, irrespective of their species.

(4) Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows, Melanie Joy,
Conari Press, 2010, pp. 29–30. Joy writes: “We eat animals without thinking
about what we are doing and why, because the belief system that underlies
this behavior is invisible. This invisible belief system is what I call
carnism … Carnism is the belief system in which eating certain animals is
considered ethical and appropriate. Carnists—people who eat meat are not the
same as carnivores. Carnivores are animals that are dependent on meat to
survive … Carnists eat meat not because they need to, but because they
choose to, and choices always stem from beliefs.”

(5) It is important to realize that we should not pretend that it is
entirely possible to abstain from the process of killing. Irrespective of
what we choose to eat, some animals are killed in the process. Even in the
cultivation of plant foods, insects are killed, the environment and wildlife
can be jeopardized, and human workers may be exploited. We must not pretend
that we can somehow be so perfect that we do not participate in killing at
all. However, there is a gradation, and people who are conscious of the
effects of their actions can follow the axiom of least harm. It is easy to
see how there is excessive and unnecessary killing involved in the
production of animal foods. There is infinitely less carnage in plant
production than in animal agriculture, so the clear ethical choice is to
reduce or abstain from animal foods.

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